Alinah Azadeh
Alinah Azadeh was born in the UK in 1968 to an Iranian mother and English father. Her early artistic background, training and practice was in drawing, painting, filmmaking and then digital media but is now totally inter-disciplinary. In 2001 she completed an MA in Art and Contemporary Media Practice at the University of Westminster, UK. Since then she has focused on public installation works - using live encounters, sculpture, digital data, textile and language – which act as a space for narrative exchange and self-reflection in response to the central themes of human experience. Many of these works are a result of collaboration and participation, with other practitioners, specific groups and/or the public.
In 2004, Azadeh became enchanted by the idea of textile as a metaphor for text and language and this became a dominant element in her installation work. She also experienced the birth of her first child and the death of her mother in the Asian Tsunami in quick succession and this had a major impact on the direction of her creative practice, initiating a desire to make relational work. The act of remembering and a sense of longing, embodied through rituals of collecting and wrapping objects and their narratives, started her on a journey into a new language of sculptural work.
Azadeh makes use of playful and reflective processes to connect and initiate intimate dialogue with others. These processes are rooted in ancient communal rituals such as Moshaereh (communal poetry reciting), bibliomancy (divining with books) and numerous forms of gift and exchange. Over the last decade, commissions have ranged from creating large-scale museum works around grief, loss and longing to digital and performance works around debt, gift and society.